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Did You Bring Me A Monkey?

April 8, 2013 14 Comments

Unorganized Hancock is back, larger than life, and twice as loud. Amazing to me what the kids have been able to do with a little bit of hardware and software thrown in. I had nothing to do with this, except pressing the big PHD button on the camera. PHD stands for “Push Here, Dummy.”

The Spare Heir is trying to get the hang of playing with his sticks held in the traditional grip, instead of the matched grip like a rock drummer. He likes videos of Jo Jones and Joe Morello, so he wanted to give it a try. He’s using sticks that resemble a bundle of chopsticks, which make a nifty stand-in for brushes.

The Heir fished out my ancient trombone, which I tried to explain to him before — that’s plumbing, not music, son.  He doesn’t listen. He’s gotten weary of looking for bass players and learned to play bass pretty passably himself in the last couple months. He’s playing my old bass, the one I told you about in this essay — er, sentence. 

If you’ve been living under a pop rock for fifty years, and don’t recognize the song they’re playing, it’s So What by Miles Davis. It’s one of the most important recordings of any kind ever made. We try to teach our children cultural literacy. Pop music is fine, and it can be sophisticated now and again, or more along the lines of I’m Henry The Eighth I Am, but very little pop music is important musically, lyrically, or culturally. People need peanut butter sandwiches as well as pate, so there’s no harm in it, really. But pop musicians that think they’re saving the world are absurd, and need to be told so, regularly.

In 1959, Miles Davis, who had been bopping hard up until that time, decided to try something new. He thought that jazz had become too dense, chordally complicated, too filigreed. He switched it up completely, and made a modal jazz record, called Kind of Blue. I’m hard pressed to come up another example groundbreaking  and earthshaking as it was in its time, and after.  Maybe Paul Whiteman playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in New York in the twenties. It’s rare that someone is able to turn the musical world on its head.

The Heir painstakingly learned to play the trumpet solo on his guitar. It was the hardest part of this for him to play, though it sounds sort of rudimentary. It’s a great education for a player. Guitar players have a tendency to play things that fall under their fingers on their instruments easily. It’s human nature. But if you learn music originally played on other instruments, you’re playing pure music. Miles was just wandering up and down a scale, followed by another scale, and those scales are superimposed over two chords. That’s what modal music is. The bass playing on that record is very fine, and it was a great education for him, too.

The Heir is named Miles, by the way.

[Many thanks to everyone that’s supported the boys’ efforts over the last year. Your support is paying off, though perhaps that’s not for me to say. You decide. There’s a tip jar in the right hand column for them if you’re so inclined. Links to their video are much appreciated as well]

[Update: Many thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Thud from Old Blighty for supporting the boys!]

[Up-Update: Many thanks to the lovely Julie from Florida for sending the boys some green courage]

Up-Up-Update: Many thanks to Barbara M. from scenic California for helping the boys out. She suggests a mandolin. I’ll go along with anything that isn’t the bagpipes]

[Updates, the Continuing Saga: Many thanks go to Leslie G. from A Z for supporting the boys!]

[Updates, We Haz Them: Our thanks go out to Kathleen M. from CT for her constant support and encouragement]

[Updates, We Got Updates:David R. from Cal-if-forn-I-A is generous with his wallet and his advice. Many thanks. He wants The Heir to buy a 5-string bass, though, but I think he has too many stings already, and have been thinking of removing the G string. Maybe we should compromise, and have him play a 4-string bass.]

[Updates Roll On: Many thanks to Paul H. from the Lone Star State for helping the boys out, and saying pleasant things, too]

[Right Up-To-Date Update: Melissa K. From Tejas is very generous. Many Thanks! There appear to be a lot of nice people in Texas]

Marvelous Mockba

April 7, 2013 3 Comments

Russia is a gangster state.

In the 1920s and 30s, lots of countries descended into gangsterism. Enormous forces, seen and unseen, pushed and pulled at people like taffy. Like horses in a burning barn, they thrashed around looking for an alternative to the rude discomforts all around them. The world is descending into gangsterism again.

Of course there’s never a shortage of Savonarolas abroad in the land. Rasputins. Caudillos and ministers and seers and strongmen. When people are suitably tenderized with the hammer of bipartisan rage followed by ennui, the gangsters take over, and add “Democratic” to the country’s name, usually, while extracting democracy like a molar with a rusty pliers. One tug, once, and it’s gone.

So Mockba sends shady people trained in the arts of war without governors to administer polonium enemas to anyone that gets in the way of looting the treasury, and the country settles down into a low boil of avoiding the wrong people with the right connections, and getting on with your life. And to someone like me that remembers the ultimate gangster state that preceded it, it’s wonderful to see.

Watching the pandemonium depicted on Mockba’s ubiquitous dashcams, and the wild melees in the street over rights of way, it’s easy to forget that none of that was necessary before, because the average person had nothing but fear or smugness in their interactions before. If you were a nobody, you’d have to immediately gauge if your tormenter was important in a pecking order hidden behind an unsmiling Berian mask. If you had a place in the ruling class, you’d only have to determine if your fender bender was caused by someone with a single-digit party card. You could treat anyone else any way you wanted. And there were no fender benders to fight over anyway, because no one had a car. You’d simply have to apologize to any driver that ran you over in a crosswalk because you knew they were important enough to have a vehicle.

So now the average person can fight with his fists in the street over slights with another average person, and a kind of rumble of vibrancy is demonstrated. It’s not a fair fight top to bottom, of course, but the crooks that run the place are more discerning gangsters than before, and don’t trifle themselves with the affairs of little people so much. And the little people make everything  go, if you will but let them. That’s why the lights are on, and the cars buzz here and there, and the boats full of people that don’t look like beaten dogs when the newspaper boy makes his delivery go to and fro.

Looks like life.

It’s Portlandish

April 6, 2013 5 Comments

That’s Portland. Portland, Maine that is. Portland isn’t the capitol of Maine. Ogguster is. Portland is the largest city, though. About 65,000 people, I think, but I refuse to look it up. You can walk all over Portland in a day. There’s a nebulous “Greater Portland” that has half a million people in it. That’s a third of the state living in one place. Portland looks fairly coherent, as cities go, because the whole place burned down a couple times, and they replaced all the buildings at the same time with brick replacements.

I’m surprised Mainers haven’t discovered how to set the bricks on fire. Yet. Everything burns to the ground in Maine, and burns again while the ashes are still warm, too. People here seem to be capable of setting anything afire, except firewood. They can’t figure out how trees are operated, I think. Everyone buys a Bean coat and a woodstove and attempts to light it with gasoline or kerosene or lighter fluid or oily rags or dead cats soaked in acetone or whatever they have handy. There are 1.3 million people in Maine, and they have 1.4 million strategies for cutting, splitting, stacking, drying, and burning wood. Every one of these strategies is ill-advised or counter-productive, except for the patently insane ones.

After you’ve set everything you own except your firewood on fire, including yourself, generally, the fire department comes and mills around in your yard admiring  your newfangled approach to burning your joint down, if you’ve got one, or perhaps remarking that the old ways are best if you’ve burned the place down in some mundane fashion. Then they sprinkle the smoking cellar hole with enough water to baptize an underweight baby, while regaling the local newspaper reporter with rundowns of how many dogs or goldfish or iguanas they rescued from the building before it got going good.

Maine’s huge, at least in New England terms. It’s about the same size as Ireland. Ireland’s essentially empty, and it has four times the population Maine does, so Maine is beyond empty. Maine is larger than all the other New England States combined. Everyone here is worried that we’re going to run out of trees sometime soon. They keep buying tracts of nothing and preserving them. It’s not possible to preserve anything for someone, because there are precious few someones here, so they preserve them from something. Mainers are always on the lookout for something that might happen. You wouldn’t want that.

A pine tree’s a form of crabgrass here, but they pay that no mind. If the potato farmers up north in Aroostook lose interest, and the pine cones get busy, you’re going to need nuclear weapons to drive to Canada. I don’t think they allow you to cross the border into Canada if you have nuclear weapons in your Kia anymore, so be sure to use them all on the forest. You can get back into the US with any old thing, so load up in Montreal for the trip back.

I live as far west from Portland as you can get without ending up in New Hampshire. We call Cumberland County, where Portland is, “Northern Massachusetts.” It doesn’t look much like Maine to my eye. I know all about Portland, though, because my wife grew up near there. I’ve been there many times over the years.

I do believe I could manage being the town drunk in Portland. It’s bigger than a job for a hobbyist, but not so big a job you’d need to hire help if you were a pro.

Take Five, Take Two

April 5, 2013 6 Comments

The boys are working on things.

We’re immensely grateful for the support the boys receive from my readers. They’re good kids, and level-headed, so they don’t make the usual mistake aspiring musicians make: Going to the music store and buying expensive and superfluous things instead of practicing. But some problems are amenable to an application of money. An expensive guitar doesn’t make you a good player. But you can buy more pixels and ram them into your videos for a few bucks.

What a lot of progress they can show since the first grainy and dark Flip-cam performance they made in our attic. The video above is remix of Take Five from two weeks ago. The Heir was able to get some software that could handle Hi-Def video. No computers in our house can handle the hi-def files, but the new software allows you to work on them in lo-def and then upload them to YouTube in up to 1080p goodness. We have a Roku box, and our TV only goes up to 720p, but it’s as clear as a DVD on the screen now, and in widescreen, too, which they weren’t able to do before using only Windows Movie Maker. The sound quality is higher, too. The two cameras we purchased a little while back were capable of recording in hi-def, and now they can make use of it. The Heir also has new monitor speakers on his computers that reproduce more of the full range of sound the two of them make. He told me that he used to mix the songs on his recorder by fiddling with them, then putting them on a thumb drive, bringing them downstairs, and then listening to them on my ancient XP computer because I had a subwoofer and it was the only way he could hear if the bass was recorded audibly enough. Then he’d go back upstairs and fiddle with it some more and try again. He did it like that for months without me knowing about it. He’d only go in my office when I wasn’t there. Kids are inventive like that sometimes. It’s the reason they’re the only persons in your house that can work the child safety locks on all the cabinets when they’re toddlers.

Dave, who dared the kids to play a Neon Trees song months ago and demanded I put up a tip jar for them, wrote in the comments the other day:

Sometimes when I feel sad I go to the Unorganized Hancock youtube channel and all my troubles seem to melt away

What a lovely sentiment. My wife and I do the same thing. The boys feel the enthusiasm for their efforts coming right through the Intertunnel, and it buoys their efforts. The Heir has also started taking music lessons over Skype from the best music teacher I’ve ever heard of, never mind met. He’s my brother. He also taught me to play years ago, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. It wasn’t his fault I never applied myself. I learned just enough music to make my wife pay five bucks to meet me, and that was plenty for me. If the boys apply themselves, they might be able to charge their prospective mates twenty bucks to meet them some day.

The Roku box lets you watch YouTube videos on your TV if you know how to set it up, and we had fun watching related videos after watching our boys. There were many that were middle and high schoolers playing songs for captive audiences of parents, with songs obviously chosen by their teachers or by someone that doesn’t like them very much. They all looked like beat dogs the whole time. I think our boys know already that music is not supposed to be entertaining for yourself, it’s supposed to entertain the audience. It’s fun and gratifying if you can pull it off, but you are not there to be amused by the audience. But it’s not supposed to make you sad, for crissakes. In my past life, I termed it “Facing the Other Way.” If you face the other way from the audience, you have certain duties and obligations, and occasionally, privileges. The boys seem clear on the concept already, which will hold them in good stead in the real world in the future.

The hi-def video files are huge. We’re purchasing a stand-alone hard drive to hold them. The boys are almost done with their next numbah, and it’ll put Take Five in the shade, I’m tellin’ ya. They owe it all to you, my Interfriends.

[Update: Kathleen M. in CT’s continuing support is a wonder. Many thanks!]

Beautiful Things. Beautiful People

April 4, 2013 6 Comments
(Lakeshore – Isaac Levitan)

Mizz E visits and comments here regularly. She’s an educator. She’s a generous contributor to the boys’ music fund for which I am grateful. She has a very sunny avatar picture. Brightens my day to see it.

She’s got a Tumblr page going. I’ve added it to my moribund and mostly obsolete blogroll. Look for it under Tail Feathers.

It’s ottist stuff, mostly. It’s from people I’m not familiar with much. Lends an air of discovery to it. I like looking at John Singer Sargent pitchas as much as the next guy — more, is more likely — but I’d like to see something different from time to time. But not bad. Some people just have a knack for curating Intertunnel collections. They’re coherent and interesting. I’m generally only one or the other of those things at a time, so I like to see them melded once in a while.

Tail Feathers

Month: April 2013

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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